Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. How is the government reforming the welfare system to support engagement, participation and responsibility?

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Solomon for his question and for his support for this very important work which is helping to reform the welfare system. Earlier today I introduced landmark legislation into the House that will see major reforms to our welfare system. There will be a new approach to income management that will see help provided to families and to individuals who are disengaged to make sure that, for those people, we see more welfare payments spent on the essentials of life and, particularly, spent in the interests of children.

These reforms, as the member for Solomon just said, build on the government’s commitment to make sure that we have a welfare system based on the principles of engagement, participation and responsibility. This will be a new national approach to welfare reform. It will start in the Northern Territory from 1 July next year and will be rolled out in urban, regional and remote parts of the Northern Territory. After an evaluation of our experience in the Northern Territory and other places in Australia where we are trialling various forms of welfare conditionality, it will be rolled out in other disadvantaged regions of the country. It will apply to young people who are not engaged in education, training or work; to the long-term unemployed who are seriously disengaged; to parents who fail to show parental responsibility; to families who are referred by child protection authorities to Centrelink to have their welfare payments income managed; and to those vulnerable Australians who have been identified by a Centrelink social worker as being at risk. There will be exemptions in this new approach for those who are engaged in full-time study or training, those who have a history of employment and parents who do demonstrate that they are doing the right thing by their children and making sure they are going to school. There will also be a system of voluntary income management attached to the scheme.

This scheme has had some positive responses already from Toby Hall, for example, from Mission Australia, who has welcomed the approach, saying that a little bit of pressure to move people off benefits is a good thing. There has also been some very positive evidence that income management is in fact working, particularly for families and their children. We have had some significant responses through the wide-ranging consultations that we have recently conducted in the Northern Territory, in which thousands of people participated. They told us loud and clear that they had more money to spend on food, to pay their rent and to buy clothes for the kids and that they were in fact spending less money on alcohol and gambling, for example. Just today there was a piece in the Northern Territory News from the manager of the supermarket at Yirrkala. He said that people at Yirrkala had seen a drop in gambling and less antisocial behaviour and, as he says, he knows firsthand that more money is being spent on essentials. So we have certainly got some very practical evidence to show that this is helpful.

These changes are of course part of a wide range of different approaches to welfare reform that this government has put in place: in the Cape York welfare reform trials, in metropolitan Perth and the Kimberley region and through the school enrolment and attendance reforms in Queensland and the Northern Territory. There are now around 400 people on income management in Western Australia and around 90 in the Cape York welfare reform trial areas. Today’s legislation also very significantly reinstates the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act to the Northern Territory Emergency Response, something that this government has been determined to do.

These are very significant reforms, and we certainly look forward to the opposition’s support for them. I particularly want to show my appreciation to the Northern Territory government. The Chief Minister’s support and assistance in the development of this package has been extremely helpful as the Northern Territory government confronts a very serious level of disadvantage in many parts of the territory.